How the Academic Left Elected ObamaBy: Dr. Paul Kengor American Thinker | Thursday, November 20, 2008

Of all the reasons why
America voted the way it did on November 4, one factor stands out:
young people and first-time voters turned out and voted overwhelmingly
for Barack Obama.

MSNBC's exit polling,
which is consistent with other exit polling, showed that voters aged
18-29, who made up nearly one in five voters -- or about 25 million
ballots -- went for Obama by more than two to one: 66 to 32 percent.
Those voters alone well exceeded Obama's overall popular vote
advantage, which was roughly eight million. Likewise, 11 percent of
voters were first-time voters, and they went for Obama at an even
higher rate: 69 to 30 percent. Single (unmarried) voters, which
constituted one in three voters, went for Obama 65 to 33 percent.

While
these categories are not monolithic, and overlap, they capture the
current generation of college students, who clearly went bonkers for
Barack Obama. Why? What are they learning -- and not learning?

These
youth live and learn on college campuses where "diversity" and
"tolerance" and "multiculturalism" -- bogus buzzwords that apply only
to ethnic, gender, and sexual diversity, not genuine diversity of ideas
-- reign supreme. Racial diversity is at the crux of this academic
trinity, the source and summit of the faith. It is the molten, golden
calf, where much of the intelligentsia and their disciples gather to
worship. Political correctness has supplanted traditional religion.

Thus,
when the university community was presented with Barack Obama, a
charismatic, impressive, seemingly excellent Democratic presidential
candidate -- who happened to be African-American -- the reaction was
nearly reverential, bordering on idolatry. The good senator's bracing
radical associations -- enough to deny any other American a security
clearance -- and which were not coincidental to a man ranked the most
leftist member of the most leftist Senate in U.S. history, didn't
matter to the academic world. Quite the contrary, those who dared to
point out these associations -- FoxNews, talk-radio, the McCain-Palin
ticket -- were deemed loathsome Neanderthals deserving of being burned
in effigy from the nearest dorm.

That
brings me to another factor in this milieu: McCain-Palin. Neither John
McCain nor Sarah Palin resonated with this gang. Given the prevailing
orthodoxy in the academic asylum, John McCain's moving personal
narrative of military valor had little impact on the college crowd.
That McCain was tortured by communists for six years didn't matter much
to these people -- the same individuals who endeavor to boot ROTC from
their campuses. And as for Sarah Palin, she represented the worst of
pariahs at the faculty club: an evangelical so consistently, comically
pro-life that she chose to do what 90 percent of women don't do when
they're informed of a prenatally diagnosed Down syndrome child -- she
delivered the baby. The feminine Palin is seen as an ideological ogre
-- an eagerly acceptable target for a torrent of bigotry by the
open-minded professoriate and its acolytes.

This
is the atmosphere in which these young people are being educated.
That's what they're learning. Equally crucial to this election,
however, is what college students are not learning:

As I noted
earlier, Americans don't care about Barack Obama's radical past,
including his links to the likes of Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis,
and Saul Alinsky, because of the failure of our educational system to
teach the lessons of the Cold War and horrors of communism. This is
especially true of higher education, where the leftist worldview is so
extreme and so upside down that America's professors share a hearty
contempt not for communism but for anti-communism.

Think
about this: The current generation of college students was born after
the fall of the Berlin Wall. These modern products of elite education
are not Reagan babies. They were not inspired by the Westminster
Address of June 1982, by the Evil Empire speech of March 1983, by
Reagan meeting with Pope John Paul II to topple communism in Eastern
Europe throughout the 1980s, or by Reagan in front of the Brandenburg
Gate in 1987, demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev tear down that cement
tombstone to human freedom. No, today's freshmen, sophomores, juniors,
and seniors, who voted for the first time on November 4, 2008, were
born after these historic events. They've received their education on
communism from their professors, which means they've received either no
education at all on the unparalleled slaughter formally known as
Marxism-Leninism, or, to the contrary, they've heard only dark, dire
lectures about the malevolence of anti-communism -- of McCarthyism.

A
deliciously fitting -- albeit depressing -- symbol of this came at the
very moment that Obama's coronation was announced by the networks. A
FoxNews camera-crew was outside the White House, where a contingent of
hysterical students from George Washington University hopped up and
down in sheer ecstasy. This was a most appropriate image, in light of
the fact that it was such voters who delivered the presidency to Obama.
I was struck, however, by the conspicuous presence of a beaming student
wearing a red t-shirt with a giant Soviet hammer and sickle. No doubt,
the young revolutionary was thrilling at the spectacle, awe-struck amid
this sea of what his mentor, Vladimir Lenin, considered "useful idiots"
-- i.e., naïve liberals incapable of realizing when they are supporting
the communists' intentions.

Ironically,
the dupes of, say, the 1950s, would have recognized the young Bolshevik
for who he was, but I seriously doubt that the typical student in that
crowd had any idea of the true loyalties of their comrade, or sensed
that they were celebrating arm-in-arm with a Marxist: Hammer-and-sickle? What's that?

What's
more, I would bet $100 that if some disgruntled conservative within the
throng yelled out, "Hey, that guy is a communist!" one of the
well-trained university brethren would have quickly denounced the
conservative -- the anti-communist -- as the real villain in the mix.
They have been carefully trained to view Joe McCarthy as more insidious
than Joe Stalin.

This
is an abbreviated way of explaining why Barack Obama's communist
connections didn't matter in this election, and how the Ivory Tower
paved the road to victory. We won the Cold War but seem to have lost
the long-term, crucial ideological struggle at home. We lost not on the
battlefield but in the classroom. On November 4, it finally came back
to bite us, and at a time (economically and politically) that couldn't
be worse.

Finally,
I should add that I've received emails in the last couple of weeks from
distraught conservative parents saddened to learn that their
college-student children voted for Obama. They shouldn't be surprised;
sadly, these parents have unwittingly paid for precisely this. In the
vast majority of the nation's colleges, this is what their children are
learning at a cost of the parents' lifetime savings. I'm reminded of
the statement from the late atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who said
that the job of professors like him was "to arrange things so that
students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists
will leave college with views more like our own" and "escape the grip
of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents."

This
has been the personal mission of many professors for decades now -- in
flagrant violation of the scandalously fraudulent mission statements of
the colleges where they teach. They've been enormously successful. The
left's gradual takeover of academia is complete -- the Long March a
stunning success. Behold: the presidency of the United States of
America.

The
fruits of the left's dogged work were on display on November 4, 2008.
And now, alas, to paraphrase the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, America's
chickens have come home to roost.

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